


Thursdays

by a_xmasmurder



Category: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Crack, Gen, Hitchhiker's Guide Crossover, Oh god, Or Fusion, What am I doing, not sure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-16
Updated: 2013-09-16
Packaged: 2017-12-26 19:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/969309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_xmasmurder/pseuds/a_xmasmurder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No cases, no work, no Sherlock...John Watson is having a nice sitdown with a cuppa and the paper. </p><p>And then all hell breaks loose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thursdays

**Author's Note:**

> Not sure if this is a crossover or a fusion. I'll figure something out. Also not sure if this is going to be a one shot or not. Feedback is welcome.

John Watson was a happy man. A very, very happy man. Well, as happy as one could be when one has been shoved out of the only life he’s ever known and dumped into a tiny little bedsit, then shoved into another life that was entirely not quite like the one he’d left behind in a very sandy place quite far away. Now, though - now he was happy. Right at that moment, he was very happy. Because he was sitting in a nice flat on Baker Street, reading the newspaper, having tea, and generally not doing much because, well, why would he? It was Thursday, and he had off from the surgery. There wasn’t much happening with cases, since Lestrade went on vacation a week ago, since very few of the Met actually liked working with Sherlock Holmes and normally just avoided him entirely when the DI wasn’t there. Speaking of his mad hatter flatmate, he was out doing God only knows what, and he hadn’t left an experiment to ooze onto the lino in the kitchen. John was alone in the flat, and he was happy. He turned to the sports section, and settled in for a good read.

“JOHN!”

Sigh. _So much for that._

“JOHN, COME DOWN HERE!”

“Just - hold on!” He levered himself out of his armchair as Sherlock barreled into the room, a book in his hands and a rather disturbed look on his face. “What is it? What in the blazes is going on that you have to - “

“No time, let’s go, have to go to the pub!” Sherlock disappeared down the hall and started knocking around in the bathroom a bit. John stood in the middle of the sitting room, feeling rather stupid right then.

“The - the _pub?_ Why - what?” He wasn’t understanding, which made him feel not smart. And he was a very smart person. He had to be, to have survived uni and the military. But then again, he was living with a mad genius, so compared to him, he was a monkey - “Sherlock!”

The whirlwind that was Sherlock Holmes swept out of the hall holding two towels and a shoulder bag that John hadn’t seen before. He shoved these things into John’s arms and grabbed the skull, set that on top of everything, then picked up John’s shoes. “Come on, we are going to be late, and I really don’t want to be late for this!” He pulled John by his shirt down the stairs and out the door, where a cab stood at the kerb, waiting. “In, John, get in!”

John managed to clamber in, still very unsure of what was happening and why they were going to the pub in a hurry - oh! “Do we have a case on?” He grabbed his shoes off the seat of the cab, and shoved them onto his feet, barely bothering with the ties.

“What?” Sherlock was staring very intently at the book in his hands, that seemed to be glowing at him. Oh, not a book - a tablet! A rather...thick tablet, at that. In fact, he’d never seen one so thick since the Army. All that extra Toughbook stuff and padding and what have you. Sherlock looked back at John, and his skin looked a bit pale. Paler than normal, by a couple shades at least.

“A case,” John prodded. “At the pub, yeah? Murder?”

“What - no, not a case. We need to drink. Carbohydrates to help with the...” With that, Sherlock slapped the cover of the tablet shut and shoved it into the shoulder bag - a satchel, really - and worked at getting the towels in there, too. “Nevermind, you wouldn’t understand anyway. We need to drink, because it will make everything easier. Trust me on this, John, it will make everything so much easier, and you will thank me for it.”

“Make what easier? Sherlock, why do we need to drink to make something easier?” John took a moment to notice that while his towel was nice and fluffy and clean, Sherlock’s was a bit...used. And not in a wet way, either. Tattered and torn up a bit, a little dirty, and that was so entirely not like Sherlock at all that it had John even more confused than usual. His brain was trying to catch up, but it was doing a bad job at it. “Um, you grabbed a dingy towel for yourself - unless that’s mine, in which case I want the clean one - for...what reason, exactly? Why are we taking towels to a pub?”

Sherlock turned and stared at him.

John tried to continue, just letting his mouth work around what his brain wasn’t doing, which was thinking. “....Well, you know...”

Sherlock cocked his head. “John -”

“....whatever we are using towels for. What are we going to use them for?”

The cab stopped in front of the pub. Apparently, Sherlock had just told the cabbie to go to the nearest one. Sherlock threw a few large denomination bills at the man in the driver’s seat. “Keep the change. You’ve got about twenty minutes to use it.”

John sat and stared at the cabbie, who stared at the money in his fist in confusion, and then Sherlock bent down to grab him by the shoulder. “Come on, John! Time is wasting, and we need to get ready!”

“Twenty min - Sherlock, what the buggering hell is going on?” He stumbled over the foyer of the Horse and Groom - _wait, where...how the bloody fuck did we get here so fast?_ \- and blinked at the people sitting inside who were all staring up at his mad fucking flatmate who had certainly taken the step off the cliff of lunacy. “Will you just -” Another yank at his sleeve propelled him over to the bar, where the madman pushed him onto a stool and waved the bartender over.

The man took his time coming over. “Yeah?”

“We need five pints of bitter, and right away. No time to waste, chop chop!” Sherlock snapped his fingers impatiently and looked at the clock. Then he pulled out his phone to cross-reference the time. “Clock’s off by two minutes and thirty five seconds. Brilliant.”

The man stared at John, and the doctor just shook his head slowly. “Um...yeah, that sounds about right. Sorry, um...” He trailed off and decided just to wave ineffectually at Sherlock, hoping that the gesture would convey what he was trying to say.

With one last glare, the bartender moved down to pour the bitter, and John narrowed his eyes at Sherlock and huffed his breath out. “Okay, you lunatic buffoon. What. Are we doing?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, John!” Sherlock slammed the rather thick tablet that had a cover like a book on the bartop and rolled his eyes dramatically. “We are drinking in a pub because the world is going to end in about -” He consulted his phone, and then a watch around his wrist “ - seventeen minutes.” The glasses - all ten of them - were plunked down in front of them, and Sherlock shoved more money at the barman. “Keep it, all of it. Get us some bar nuts. Little packets of nuts? We are going to need the protein and energy for the re-materialisation. Takes a lot of of you to teleport.”

The man stared down at the wad of money in his hand, and John blinked. _Re...materialisation? Teleport...what? Huh?_ The barman finally spoke. “You...can’t be serious, laddy.”

“Oh, on the contrary.” Sherlock grinned his Cheshire cat grin, the one that made people wonder about his sanity. “I couldn’t be more so.” He turned to John, who was, by now, very not happy. Actually, he was getting downright hostile about this. He was just sitting and having a nice cuppa, and now he’s in a pub with this maniac drinking bitters at bloody half eleven because the world is ending! “World’s ending, John. Drink up.”

Mechanically, John took a sip of his bitter and watched Sherlock drain the entire mug in one go, then move on to number two. _Well, he hasn’t led me astray yet._ He shrugged. _Bottoms up, I guess._ He drank down the beer and grabbed the second one as handfuls of bar nuts were slapped in front of them by the now worried looking barman.

“Urm...the world is going to end?”

“Of course,” Sherlock murmured. “The Vogons have declared this planet disposable. It’s in the way of yet another pointless hyperspace route, honestly, why do we even need the damned thing is beyond me, it will just cause another snarl at the traffic circle by Alpha Centauri...” He trailed off, leaving the barman - and John - hideously perplexed. John blinked.

“Thought you didn’t know anything about the star systems? Deleted it and all that?”

Sherlock grabbed his third drink. “Oh, I accidentally deleted it from the Guide once, I know that. Besides, the less I seem to know about the important things, the less questions are asked. Now drink, we’ve got thirteen minutes and you need to eat these.” He shoved packets into John’s hands, and shoved more into his satchel. “Stock up, eat, drink.”

“What...should we do?” The barman asked. Sherlock stared at him, a muscle twitching in his eye.

“What is your name? It’s Steve or Frank or Robert or something. You have two dogs, large ones; happily married with no children, a parakeet that likes to nibble on your ear, and a rather roughly running Toyota Corolla. You have a congenital heart condition and asthma, and you are an occasional smoker, especially when you are out with your friends. Wife doesn’t know about the smoking, but she does know about your penchant of spending half your paycheck on little gifts for her, which is sweet but pointless because she loves you so much that you could give her coal and she’d be happy. Your sister is a serial cheater, and your brother is an engineer who works for Boeing. You have a brother-in-law in the military, Navy, and he just recently had shore leave.” Sherlock shook his head. “No, nevermind all of that, it’s not important anymore. So what’s your name?”

“Sam. Uh, how did you know - ”

“Always get something wrong.” Sherlock smiled his ‘I’m trying to be normal and this is the best I can do’ grin. John now wonders if it’s not for a different reason. “Ah, well, there really isn’t anything you can do.” He gulps down the last two beers and yanks John away from his last one, grabbing the skull at the last moment. “But if you need to do something...go ahead and lay down with a bag over your head. Paper is best, I think.”

“Will it help?” A lady in the back piped up.

“Not at all.” Sherlock smirked. “Have a good rest of your lives!” He pushed out the doors, dragging John with him.

John let himself get dragged along for a bit, mainly because he was confused. Very confused. The sort of confused one would be if, say, someone knocked on your door to tell you that they were mowing down your house to make way for a new bypass...

“Hold it, hold up, Sherlock - WAIT!” John dug his heels into the pavement as well as he could, trying to halt their forward progress. Sherlock alternated between staring incredulously at John, taking glances at that tablet...thingie, and staring up into the sky. John finally had quite enough of the pulling, thank you very much, and yanked his arm out of Sherlock’s grip.

“Oh for the love of Pete, John!” Sherlock whipped around and stalked up to the man. “We need to go - “

“Yes, exactly that. We need to go.” John nodded and crossed his arms over his chest. “Where, Sherlock? Where are we going?”

Sherlock hissed impatiently and groaned. “Away. Off this doomed planet.” He sighed, making all the noises of the terminally put-upon and ornery. “And I was just getting to the good parts of this bloody out-of-the-way rock.” He poked the tablet. “This Guide won’t tell me a thing. Stupid useless piece of junk.”

“I’m...sorry? What? Guide?” John shook his head, trying to wrap his poor brain around what was happening, but his brain wasn’t having anything to do with it. His brain wanted to take a vacation, or at least a drive out to the Moors to have a nice sit-down somewhere quiet and not so strange. “What the hell are you talking about?” He was starting to feel the drinks, and he swayed on his feet a little.

“Oh, don’t worry, you people wouldn’t understand. Idiots.”

John squinted. “Sherlock.”

“Oh, don’t be like that. Everyone is. Including the writers of this bloody book!” Sherlock shook the tablet and growled at it. “Idiots, each and every one of them.” He sighed again, and slipped it back into his satchel. “Almost time.” He pulled what looked to be a large, bulky ring out of his hip pocket and slipped it onto his thumb. John stared at it, then at Sherlock in general.

“What. Is. That?”

Sherlock cocked his head, then apparently made the decision to no longer keep his friend in the dark. He stepped forward and put both hands on John’s shoulders.

“Listen. Do you really, honest to goodness think that someone like me could exist on Earth?”

“Uh...”

Sherlock glanced back up at the sky, then back down. “John. I am an alien.”

“Um...”

“From around the vicinity of Betelgeuse.”

John looked down at Sherlock’s kneecaps. “Sherlock...”

“And right now, this planet is slated for demolition, and we need to get off of it before that happens.”

John wanted to sit down. He did. He sank down to the pavement and folded his hands in front of his mouth. Sherlock stood for a bit longer, then joined him on the ground.

“John, you have to listen to me.”

“I...am, I’m listening. I’m just not sure I’m understanding.” John shook his head. “You are an alien from Betelgeuse.”

“Around there, yes.”

“And Earth is about to be destroyed.”

Sherlock nodded.

“I don’t think I had enough to drink at the pub.” John got up, turned around, and started heading back the way they came, but Sherlock leapt to his feet too and grabbed his arm again.

“No time, John. You need to trust me.”

John whirled around. “Trust you? You just told me you’re an alien from outer space! After that bullshit with not knowing the Earth went around the Sun?”

Sherlock shook his head. “The Guide needs to be updated. Like I said, written by idiots. I genuinely thought that your star system was one of the rare ones that the star revolved around the planet because of the mass of the planetary core. That’s why I came here to begin with, to study it and the life on it. Then I deleted the wrong parts out of the Guide and never bothered to fix it, and...” He sighed. “Look, I’m sorry...”

“And then what was that with the cabbie?”

Sherlock grinned. “That was all me. I was - still am - rather interested in murders and serial killers. Humans normally irritate me, because they are so boring.”

John stopped and thought about the random disappearances over the last week, the last one being Gregory Lestrade himself. Now he wondered if people had actually gone on vacation, or if... “What about your brother Mycroft?”

That gave Sherlock pause. “I do hope he’s gotten the message. He’s the one that took me in when I first arrived here. I got into trouble the moment I stepped out of the shuttle.”

John shook his head in disbelief again. “Shuttle?”

Sherlock waved his hand in dismissal. “Not important, I - “

All of a sudden, there was a great whooshing noise, a very loud noise heard all over the world. Literally. John and Sherlock clapped their hands over their ears and looked up - well, Sherlock looked up. John closed his eyes and hoped to God that the horrid noise would stop. Little did he know that there was a great debate about the very existence of God, but we aren’t going to get into that just now. What we are going to get into is the fact that right then, when he realised the noise had indeed stopped and looked up, that he was shocked. Too shocked to even think. He couldn’t comprehend what his eyes were sending to his brain. There were boxes, great rectangular boxes in the sky. He pointed up at them. His jaw worked. Noise wasn’t working.

“Yes, John. Those are Vogons.”

Noise suddenly worked again. “THOSE. THINGS? That’s a VOGON?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “No, you idiot, those are the Vogon construction fleet - oh, why am I even trying to explain - “

A very high pitched screech, much like the feedback from a public address system, rendered John’s ears useless, and he yelled in pain like everyone else in the streets around them, around the world, everywhere. Then there was a new sound, like someone trying to gargle a porcupine. John scowled at the ground, trying to figure out what this new sound was.

“John!”

John was too busy listening to the mailbox next to them, which was acting as a speaker, apparently.

“People of Earth, your attention, please.” The voice said.

“Oh, this is not on. This can’t be happening,” John muttered unhappily. Today was turning out to be a rather horrid day, and he still wasn’t sure what was going on. Yes, yes, world ending, Sherlock’s an alien from some planet, and now there were more aliens talking to them about...basically what the insufferable bastard told him - that the Earth was being destroyed to make way for a hyperspace whatsit, and now Sherlock was gripping his wrist rather tightly. “Sherlock -”

“We have to go. Now.” The man - alien - whatever lifted his arm, thumb stuck out, and pointed it at the sky. “I hope this works.”

“Hope what works?”

Sherlock looked back down to John, a grin spreading across his face as wind started to howl along with the screams of the people around them. Apparently, the so called Vogons had stopped talking.

“We are hitching a ride. Hold on, and don’t hold your breath.”

John’s last thought was _Oh, God. Thursdays. I could never get the hang of Thursdays._

  
  
  



End file.
